Title: Enterprise Cloud Architect
Duration: 1 Year contract
Location: Richmond, VA
Job Description:
Are any preferred certifications:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or Associate; AWS Certified Security - Specialty or Advanced Networking - Specialty is a plus.
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert; Azure Security Engineer Associate is a plus.
- TOGAF certification or comparable enterprise architecture experience.
- Other relevant cloud, security, networking, Kubernetes, FinOps, or DevOps certifications.
Required Knowledge, Skills, and Experience
- 10+ years of experience, including significant responsibility for enterprise architecture, cloud architecture, solution design, platform strategy, or large-scale technology transformation.
- Demonstrated ability to develop technology strategy and roadmaps, connect architecture decisions to business outcomes, and guide change across a large, complex organization.
- Strong enterprise and solution architecture skills across business, application, data, integration, security, infrastructure, and operations domains.
- Excellent systems thinking and design judgment, including the ability to analyze dependencies, compare options, document tradeoffs, and balance strategic direction with delivery realities.
- Executive-ready written and verbal communication skills; ability to tell a clear architecture story, facilitate difficult decisions, build consensus, and professionally challenge assumptions.
- Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries, work effectively in matrixed teams, and build trusted relationships with business leaders, engineers, security teams, and vendors.
- Experience creating and governing reference architectures, principles, standards, reusable patterns, architecture decision records, and technology lifecycle roadmaps.
- Experience leading architecture reviews and evaluating solutions for security, compliance, availability, scalability, performance, interoperability, maintainability, supportability, and cost.
- Practical knowledge of cloud operating models, landing zones, account/subscription structures, identity and access management, network segmentation, private connectivity, encryption, logging, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, GitOps, policy as code, automated security controls, configuration management, and software supply-chain practices.
- Working knowledge with cloud-native and modern application architecture, including APIs, event-driven integration, microservices, modular architectures, containers, Kubernetes, serverless computing, managed platform services, and modernization patterns.
- Working knowledge of cloud financial management, vendor management, technology risk, regulatory compliance, and architecture governance.
- Ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, and remain effective when requirements or technology conditions change.
What soft skill requirements do you have (team fit and personality requirements)?
- Strong communication skills both verbal and written
- Ability to lead, collaborate, or work effectively in a variety of teams, including multi-disciplinary teams
High Level Project Overview:
The IT Enterprise Cloud Architect is responsible for shaping enterprise cloud strategy, target-state architecture, standards, and technology roadmaps. The role connects business priorities with secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective technology solutions. It provides architecture leadership across cloud transformation, application modernization, platform engineering, security, data, integration, and operations.
The successful candidate combines strong enterprise architecture judgment with practical solution-design depth. This person must bring cloud architecture expertise and the ability to simplify complex topics, assess tradeoffs, influence decisions without formal authority, and communicate clearly with executives, business partners, architects, engineers, security teams, and vendors.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain enterprise cloud strategy, principles, target-state architectures, reference architectures, standards, and multi-year technology roadmaps aligned with business objectives and technology strategy.
- Partner with business and technology leaders to translate business capabilities, risks, regulatory obligations, and investment priorities into actionable architecture decisions and transition plans.
- Lead architecture for major cloud, hybrid-cloud, migration, modernization, platform, and shared-service initiatives from early concept through delivery and operational readiness.
- Collaborate with other Enterprise Architects to define reusable cloud architecture patterns and guardrails for identity, networking, compute, containers, serverless, storage, databases, integration, security, observability, resiliency, backup, disaster recovery, and cost management.
- Provide architecture governance through design reviews, standards conformance, exception evaluation, risk identification, and practical remediation guidance.
- Assess the current technology landscape, identify capability gaps, duplication, technical debt, lifecycle risk, and modernization opportunities, and recommend sequenced improvements.
- Guide workload placement, cloud service standards, and solution architecture design using business value, security, compliance, resiliency, performance, operability, portability, and total-cost considerations.
- Advance secure-by-design and automation-by-default practices, including Infrastructure as Code, policy as code, continuous integration and delivery, GitOps, automated testing, and continuous compliance.
- Promote financial accountability and optimization into cloud decisions.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, cloud services, vendor products, and commercial solutions; lead proofs of concept and provide objective recommendations based on enterprise fit and measurable outcomes.
- Collaborate with peer enterprise architects, solution architects, cloud platform teams, cybersecurity, data, integration, network, infrastructure, application teams, and operations to produce coherent end-to-end designs.
- Mentor architects and engineering teams, strengthen architecture practices, and create clear guidance, diagrams, roadmaps, and presentations that enable consistent decisions across the enterprise.
- Communicate architecture direction, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership, in clear business language.
Required Years of Experience:
- 10+ years of experience, including significant responsibility for enterprise architecture, cloud architecture, solution design, platform strategy, or large-scale technology transformation.
Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Information Systems
Are there any specific companies/industries you d like to see in the candidate s experience?
- Prior experience in large scale IT companies or in regulated industries
Preferred Interview Process Overview (High level):
